On the last days of December, 2025, protests started in different cities across Iran. With more people joining the movement, the regime opened fire on civilians with a brutal force worse than ever seen before. With almost two weeks of Internet shutdown and absence of any non-regime affiliated reports, there are no official numbers of deaths, but when the state reports more than three thousand, Iranians know the actual numbers must be much more.

During the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, revolutionary songs were released from known and anonymous artists. But in January 2026, there was only silence. Everyone knew someone who got killed in the protest. There was no place for music. But after families were able to receive the bodies of their lost loved ones, and when there were burial ceremonies, music and dance began to become part of a new uprising. Justice-seeking families wanted to be as far from whatever the Islamic Republic stood for as possible. Instead of Quran recitals, there was music, and instead of Islamic ceremonies, there were ancestral cultures and dances. Starting from a mother doing a ceremonial dance for her lost son, this ceremony was adopted with Persian songs and dance in Tehran and Kurdish dance and culture in Kurdistan.

In this paper, I am looking at the cultural shift and role of music and dance as protest in the burial ceremonies of the protesters, while highlighting protest music during the 2022 movement and the silence during 2026.